A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  From then on, the committee was mostly on the defensive, Young on the offensive. He said that HUAC, or at least its former chairman, John Rankin, had once declared the NAACP to be a subversive group and that in his opinion the committee itself was un-American. Pressed to answer whether he knew of any Communist Party activities in Detroit, he turned the question into a heated dispute over stool pigeons with Potter, Michigan’s usually temperate congressman.

  Mr. Young: You have me mixed up with a stool pigeon.

  Mr. Potter: I have never heard of anybody stooling in the Boy Scouts.

  Mr. Young: I was a member of the organization.

  Mr. Potter: I don’t think they are proud of it today.

  Mr. Young: I will let the Scouts decide that.

  Not long after that, Young took on Wood, again over a southerner saying “Niggra,” this time as a way to probe deeper into the Jim Crow legacy of the chairman and his home state. The exchange began when Wood asked Young to differentiate between the National Negro Labor Council and the National Negro Congress.

  Mr. Young: I would inform you, also, the word is Negro.

  Mr. Wood: I am sorry. If I made a different pronouncement of it, it is due to my inability to use the language any better than I do. I am trying to use it properly.

  Mr. Young: It may be due to your southern background.

  Mr. Wood: I am not ashamed of my southern background. For your information, out of the 112 Negro votes cast in the last election in the little village from which I come, I got 112 of them. That ought to be a complete answer of that. Now, will you answer the question?

  Mr. Young: You are through it now, is that it?

  Mr. Wood: I don’t know.

  Mr. Young: I happen to know, in Georgia, Negro people are prevented from voting by virtue of terror, intimidation, and lynchings. It is my contention you would not be in Congress today if it were not for the legal restrictions on voting on the part of my people.

  When the discussion turned to fascism and Nazism and whether Young would defend the country against foreign enemies, Potter took the lead again. By his own history, he had the most authenticity in the room. He was sitting there with prosthetic legs. But even here, Young held his own.

  Mr. Potter: Mr. Young, I believe in your statement that you said that you were in the service fighting fascism during the last war.

  Mr. Young: That is right.

  Mr. Potter: Then it is proper to assume that you are opposed to totalitarianism in any form, as I am.

  Mr. Young: I fought and I was in the last war, Congressman, that is correct, as a Negro officer in the Air Corps. I was arrested and placed under house arrest and held in quarters for three days in your country because I sought to get a cup of coffee in a United States Officers Club that was restricted for white officers only. That is my experience in the United States Army.

  Mr. Potter: Let me say this, I have the highest admiration, yes, the highest admiration for the service that was performed by Negro soldiers during the last war. They performed brilliantly.

  Mr. Young: I am sure the Negro soldiers appreciate your admiration, Mr. Potter.

  Mr. Potter: At the same time, while I am just as much opposed to Nazism and fascism as you are, I am opposed to totalitarianism in any form. As you well know the Communist International as dictated from Soviet Russia is probably the most stringent form of totalitarian government in the world today. In case, and God forbid that it ever happens, but in case the Soviet Union should attack the United States, would you serve as readily to defend our country in case of such eventuality as you did during the last war?

  Mr. Young: As I told you, Congressman, nobody has had to question the patriotism, the military valor, of the Negro people. We have fought in every war.

  Mr. Potter: I am not talking about the Negro people. I am talking about you.

  Mr. Young: I am coming to me. I am part of the Negro people. I fought in the last war and I would unhesitatingly take up arms against anybody that attacks this country. In the same manner, I am now in the process of fighting against what I consider to be attacks and discrimination against my people. I am fighting against un-American activities such as lynchings and denial of the vote. I am dedicated to that fight and I don’t think I must apologize or explain it to anybody, my position on that.

  When his testimony was finished, Young rose from the witness table and strode toward the rear of the chamber, surrounded by supporters and other witnesses who reached out to shake his hand and offer words of praise. He had bucked the committee in a way no one else had, and the effect was electric. Reporters were stunned and asked Tavenner and the congressmen how and why Young got such leeway to spar with his inquisitors. “It just happened,” a reporter for the Free Press was told. The paper’s story about the confrontation in Room 740 ran under the headline “Committee Loosens Reins, Defiant Witness Runs Wild.” The subhead: “Fight over Terminology Bitterest of Hearing.”

  For days thereafter, as Coleman Young moved through the streets of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley and all the black neighborhoods in town, he was hailed as a hero. “I felt like Joe Louis home from a fight,” he said later in an interview with Studs Terkel, the oral historian, in reference to the heavyweight champ who lived in Detroit. “People called out my name as I walked down the street and small crowds gathered when I stopped. Guys patted me on the back in the barber shop. That single incident endeared me to the hearts of black people. Fightin’ back, saying what they wanted to say all their lives to a southern white.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE SIX other witnesses called before the committee that day, but only one drew much press attention. “A bespectacled veteran of the Spanish Civil War and World War II defied efforts of the House un-American Activities Committee to link him with Red youth movements,” the page 7 article on this witness began. “Robert Cummins, 35, of 3026 Pingree, hid behind the Constitution to evade answering questions. Cummins, jobless paint salesman and graduate of the University of Michigan in 1937, jousted frequently with Frank S. Tavenner, committee counsel. The committee learned nothing from Cummins that it had not known before he took the stand.”

  Michigan graduate, veteran of the Spanish Civil War; Robert Adair Cummins was my mother’s older brother.

  7

  * * *

  A New World Coming

  THE LATE-NIGHT HANGOUT for students who worked at the Michigan Daily in the 1930s was a dark and dank basement joint called Hagen’s Recess Tavern on Ashley Street between Liberty and Washington. “Enjoy your beer in atmosphere,” was the Ann Arbor bar’s slogan, and it was advice the young journalists heeded, especially on Friday nights after the week’s run of papers was done. Once a year, on a Friday evening in early May, there was a ritual at Hagen’s during which the Daily crowd drank and partied with even more intensity. That was the night appointments for the next year were being decided: who would get reporting and subediting slots and who would make the masthead as managing editor, city editor, and editorial director. Everyone came to this annual event, from freshmen tryouts to graduating seniors, bringing individual anxieties about their futures. By the end of the night, the prodigious consumption of beer was intended to ease all concern.

  At the 1937 gathering, the freshmen tryouts included Stanley M. Swinton, and among the soon-to-depart seniors was Bob Cummins, my uncle. Swinton would go on to become city editor of the Daily three years later, and from there launch a distinguished life in journalism. He viewed Mussolini’s corpse in Italy, interviewed Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi (“Nobody will bring freedom to you, you must fight for it,” Ho told him), and ended his career in New York City as vice president of the Associated Press. But before all that, in the second semester of his first year at the University of Michigan, he observed the raucous appointments night in the basement tavern. It was an evening he would not forget, largely because of one townie who had enrolled at Michigan at the bottom of the Depression four years earlier and was about to step into a wider world that seemed on th
e brink of frightful collapse.

  The seniors were wistful about leaving a fraternal newspaper subculture that had defined their college existence, Swinton later wrote. And within that cohort “the picture of one is focused more sharply on my memory than any other—Bob Cummins. Brown-haired, short [five eight], alive with a strange, amusing personality he exhibited only after too much beer, the Bob of that night was a memorable person. He would leap to his feet and roar the words of ‘Solidarity Forever’ [the anthem of the labor movement] in a voice tremendous for one so small. And after he was finished, a slightly sodden onlooker would giggle a request for the ‘Viennese Bon-Bon’ and Bob would hide under the table or scuttle across the room in a feverish, intoxicated attempt to escape from view before others took up the cry. We had all had enough to drink so that it seemed tremendously funny. In a minute, Bob would peek through a crack in the door or stick his head out from under a table and, reassured that he was no longer the center of attention, rejoin us.”

  When the drink fest broke up at two in the morning, after “the last quarter-barrel of beer had been emptied and the manager wisely refused us another on credit,” the raggedy Daily platoon staggered back to the Publications Building on Maynard Street. Lagging far to the rear were Bob and a fellow senior, Joe Mattes, the managing editor, who had stopped at Capitol Market to buy one last six-pack, and they were making their way through the dark streets belting out more verses of “Solidarity Forever.”

  Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite

  Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?

  Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?

  For the union makes us strong.

  It was not just because of the things Bob did that night that Swinton remembered it so vividly. It was also because of the seriousness of what he undertook next. Within five weeks, as soon as he graduated, Bob left Ann Arbor to fight against fascists in Spain. That part of his story was rooted in American geography and belief and then nurtured by an idealistic habit of mind on the Michigan campus.

  * * *

  THE CUMMINS FAMILY arose from the middle of America. This was not the setting of pastoral heartland mythology but a hard land of hard times. My grandfather, Andrew Adair Cummins, was born in a slanting one-room dugout cut into the slope of a hillside amid the wheat fields south of Cawker City in north-central Kansas. If Kansas was a prairie state, it was not a monotonous plain. The country near Cawker City had rolling hills and valleys and was “windswept, open and free,” as he later described it. The year was 1887. Buffalo had roamed there only a few decades earlier, and so had the Pawnee. His parents arrived in that spot after traipsing from place to place in the aftermath of a grasshopper plague in 1874 that had driven them off a farm near Great Bend, a hundred miles to the south. Grasshoppers by the millions, vast swarms that blackened the sky to the horizon and descended like violent thunderstorms pounding the Plains.

  In the Cummins lineage, that plague was not necessarily the worst horror. Andrew’s father’s father was said to be a plague all to himself, an irascible man out of Indiana whom “Jesus Christ himself couldn’t get along with,” as a family friend once lamented. This Cummins was so ornery he was likely to coldcock anyone nearby when the mood struck, and once for no reason he clobbered Andrew’s father over the head with a pitchfork.

  Grasshopper infestations and rugged living conditions were all part of life on the Plains. Six people lived in that one-room dugout near Cawker City: my grandfather, his three older brothers, and their parents. It was their home for a few years, until they found a rickety farmhouse where they stayed until the second of two wheat crop failures drove them off the land for good. In 1895 they bundled all their belongings into a covered wagon, tied a cow and a pony named Flora to the back, and left Cawker City for the big city of Wichita. They slept on the side of the sticky clay roads and cooked at campfires in the rain. The 180-mile trip took ten days and changed Andrew’s life for the better. He excelled at school in Wichita and as an athlete, and eventually went on to the University of Kansas, where he competed as a two-miler on the track team (his nickname was “Little Cummins”) and took physical education courses from James Naismith, the inventor of basketball.

  He had to leave college when he ran out of money, returned for a while, and then, as a broke upperclassman, withdrew for good before graduation, but by then he had learned enough at Kansas to develop skills for his life’s profession as a civil engineer. He met a diminutive blond-haired farm girl named Grace Dever, my grandmother, at one of his first jobs, at the Coleman Lamp Company in Wichita. Grace was from the Leon area in Butler County, east of Wichita and between Augusta and El Dorado, the communities where Barack Obama’s maternal ancestors, the Paynes and Dunhams, lived. Her family left the state for a stretch, when her father participated in one of the Oklahoma land rushes that allowed stake claims on “unassigned” territory snatched from relocated Indians, but eventually they returned to the more familiar turf of Kansas.

  After Andrew and Grace were married, the pattern of their existence evoked a variation of what came before, repeating on a larger scale the nomadic early life of Andrew’s parents. With five children along the way—Bob and his twin sister, Barbara, born in 1916; a younger brother, Phil, two years later; then my mother, Mary; and the baby, Jean—they embarked on a decade-and-a-half-long journey around the Plains and Midwest. My grandfather referred to himself professionally as A. A. Cummins, civil engineer, in his constant search for work at dams and other major construction projects. At times he left the family temporarily behind; at other times his wife and children came along with him to Wisconsin, Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana, or Michigan. As a young girl, my mother accompanied him on one summer job; she remembered sleeping in a trailer in the woods near a construction site.

  The Depression had cost A.A. a place to work and, by 1931, his life’s savings. It also “changed his opinion about the benevolence of business, and his political orientation,” my mother recalled. He transformed from a Country Club Republican into a Democrat who would vote for Roosevelt in the next presidential election. In defiance of the bleak economic conditions, he borrowed enough money from a contractor associate and an insurance policy to start his own engineering firm with partner Hawley Barnard. Cummins & Barnard specialized in the modernization of manufacturing plants with cost-effective heating and cooling systems. He and Grace chose to locate the business and their family in Ann Arbor precisely so their five children, all bright students, could attend the excellent schools there, including the university.

  In one of their many stops before that, when the family lived in Evansville along the Ohio River, three of the Cummins children, led by Bob, gained recognition as Best Citizens at Campbell Elementary School, demonstrating self-control, fair play, helpfulness, industry, courtesy, cheerfulness, loyalty, kindness, reliability, and cleanliness. The Cummins clan had tempered considerably since the days of that old man who cracked the head of his son with a pitchfork. These school honors were an unprecedented achievement that brought the parents a letter of praise from John O. Chewning, the superintendent of Evansville schools. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Cummins, Your children, Robert, Barbara and Phillip, have brought extraordinary honor to your household,” Chewning wrote. Other families had produced two Best Citizens, but the Cummins family stood alone with three. “This is a remarkable testimonial to the fine influence of your home.” That was in 1928. Within a decade, all three of those Best Citizens would be young radicals.

  Baseball was Bob’s first love. When his father was on the road, young Bob wrote him long letters that meticulously detailed the latest news in the American League and recounted ball games he had listened to on the radio. “How is the Philco radio?” he asked his dad in one letter. “Ours is slightly better, I think, since I changed the tubes around a bit. Washington comes to Detroit tomorrow. The Tigers are hitting and pitching, and I look for them to take three out of four. They are only ½ game from
seventh place and 10 or 11 from the first division.” On the back side of that letter, Bob, like a budding sportswriter, presented a full report on the game of the night before under the penciled all-caps headline “TIGER BATS DEFEAT RED SOX. HEAVY HITTING ENABLES TIGERS TO WIN, 9–6. BOSTON RALLY CUT SHORT.”

  * * *

  THAT PASSION FOR the national pastime would never wane, and once Bob reached the University of Michigan he continued writing about it as a cub reporter for the Daily. With upperclassmen taking loftier assignments, his first bylines during his freshman year were in the sports section. He reported that more college graduates were going into the major leagues, thus raising the average age and education of ballplayers. He declared Whitey Wistert’s one-hit, sixteen-strikeout game against Ohio State at Ferry Field the outstanding Wolverine sports achievement of 1934. He correctly predicted that the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals would meet in the World Series, then turned to football for stories about the hundred-man crew that cleared snow from the seats and aisles of Michigan Stadium and spread a tarpaulin across the field before bad weather games, and how the offense was going to be led by a pint-sized 140-pound quarterback. Back to baseball the next spring, with an American League preview and a piece about Casey Stengel’s Brooklyn Dodgers, a team, he concluded, that “will still be daffy and still be trying.”

  The Daily came out five mornings a week, with an after-midnight press run of 3,500 copies, written by and for Michigan students. Yet to call it a campus newspaper seems wholly inadequate. Reading through old issues from the 1930s, I was struck by the depth and breadth of its coverage, which surpassed all but a select few American newspapers. Bob’s early musings on big league baseball were merely entertaining footnotes in the information-laden publication. It subscribed to the wire services and ran lengthy national and world dispatches, then supplemented those accounts with analyses from professors, scientists, and public officials. There was an earnestness to the paper’s interests that reflected the seriousness of the era. Here were multipart series on the decline of southern agriculture and the menace of Hitler’s Germany and the importance of federal support of theater; essays on the writers Thomas Wolfe and Richard Wright, and reviews of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy. And there was uncommon talent on the staff, men—and a few women—who were future top editors of magazines, newspapers, and wire services, as well as poets, novelists, and playwrights, the most famous being Arthur Miller, who had arrived in Ann Arbor from Brooklyn a year after my uncle and joined him on the Daily staff, one of their many connections.